Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,14
the curb like this, squinting into the sun, shouting at her over the traffic noise like a dumb tourist asking for directions to Stanley Park. But I don’t feel comfortable going onto the grass, either. It somehow feels private, like a front porch or a living room, and I’m reluctant to get any closer without an invitation.
Fake Fur Woman nudges her companion in the ribs.
“She’s looking for the art museum, Don. You’re in the wrong place, baby. You gotta take the number nineteen bus all the way downtown and get off at Granville. The bus stops right over there. You can stick your bike on the front, they got racks.”
She’s giving me directions to the big modern art gallery downtown. I squirm. It would be useless to explain. Instead, I nod and look where she’s pointing.
“Okay, thanks. You guys have a good one.”
“Take care of yourself, baby.”
The guy named Don says something I can’t make out, and I hear Fake Fur Woman telling him to shut up and be nice to that little girl. “She’s looking for the art museum, Don!”
I wave good-bye to them and go a little farther down East Pender, scanning the storefronts for anything resembling the brick warehouse where Sukey had her show. There’s a smoke shop and a convenience store, but nothing with the scuffed white door I remember. Then I come to some apartment buildings and a parking garage.
A parking garage like the one we circled the neighborhood for half an hour looking for on the night of Sukey’s show.
I hurry back to the convenience store and ask the old Punjabi guy at the counter if he knows of an art space in the area. He glares at me like I’ve just asked if I can use the employees-only bathroom and shakes his head, muttering, “No.”
I wander down a few alleys and even get excited at one point and knock on the door of what turns out to be a shelter for runaway teens. The spiky-haired woman who answers the door says the Freedom from Drugs Group doesn’t start until one p.m., and I back away awkwardly, mumbling something about coming back later.
I look up razzle!dazzle!space on my phone’s crappy internet browser, but either it doesn’t exist anymore or it’s too hip to have a website. I’m just about to ride home in defeat when I hear someone shouting at me.
“Hey! HEY!”
For a second I think I dropped something. I brake hard, feeling my pockets for phone, wallet, keys. All present and accounted for. I scan the busy street until my eyes locate the person shouting.
He’s lurching down the sidewalk on crutches, one denim pant leg pinned shut below the knee. His face is partly shadowed by the brim of his baseball cap. He has the body of a retired gym teacher or a summer-league soccer coach: square build, with strong-looking arms gripping his crutch handles and a sagging belly.
I’m still sitting on my bicycle. I warily dismount and lift it onto the sidewalk, already preparing my defense: No, I don’t have any spare change, I don’t want to answer a personal question, no, no thank you, no.
He catches up with me and I manage to sneak a quick glance at his face before looking back at the road, which I am pretending to scan for a friend’s car. He has grizzled cheeks, lips so stained from smoking they’re almost gray, and eyes too big for his head, like golf balls stuffed into sockets intended for marbles. When he speaks, his breath is sour with beer.
“You the kid came down here on the bike Tuesday night?”
I blink at him uncomprehendingly. He wobbles closer, his eyes flitting over my face, my clothing, and lingering on my earrings.
“I’ll be damned,” he mutters. “You are Sukey’s sister, aren’t you?”
When he says her name, my nerves light up. Those two syllables coming from a stranger’s mouth, coming from this stranger’s mouth, disorient me completely.
“Doug Fieldgrass,” he says, extending a petrified claw. My ears ringing, I reach out and shake it.
“Kiri Byrd.”
chapter eight
I don’t like the way Doug smells, or the tattoo on his left arm identifying him as a member in good standing of the Hells Angels. I don’t like the tallboy of Coors Light sticking out of his pocket, or the fact that he’s as tipsy as a turtle at eleven a.m. I don’t like the way he stands too close to me, breathing into my face like a boy at an eighth-grade dance. I don’t like